Every few years, I reach out to longtime family friend Greg Babbitt to go out with him for a day of deer hunting. He’s an experienced outdoorsman and high school agriculture teacher.

We went out after a Wawa hoagie lunch, hunkering down in thorny brush on farmland owned by one of his students and sitting there for in the cold, with a gentle snowfall a week before the close of hunting season.

At dusk, a fox came as near to us as I had ever experienced before being startled when he realized we were there, but not even a spot of anything else, though we heard some deer as we got up to leave. Still, it was a beautiful day with a good friend.

Afterward we went out to dinner with my friend’s new wife, before I drove home out of the growing snow storm.